Mrs. Thorp’s Third Grade Blog

What do you do when your child is reading to you and he/she does not know a word?  The easiest thing to do is to tell your child the word, but that is not the best thing to do in most cases.

Here are some ideas that you can use when your child does not know a word:

• Have your child look at the pictures (if there are any)  on the page for clues.
• Tell your child to keep reading the rest of the sentence to see if something in the sentence gives a clue to the unknown word.
• Have your child look at the unknown word to see if it looks like another word that he already knows.  For example, if your child does not know the word “few”  but does know the word “new”, he can use what he does know to figure out what he does not know.
• Show your child how to find little words inside bigger words, for example, “independent” has “in” and “pen” inside of it.

What do you do when your child reads a word incorrectly?

1. Ask your child if that word makes sense in that sentence.
2. Ask your child if it looks right.
3. Ask your child of it sounds right.
4. Have your child look at the whole word.  Sometimes children only look at the first part of a word and guess at the rest.  Therefore, they will read “play” when the word is “playful”, or “someone”  for “something”.

I hope that these ideas help.  Let me know if you have any other ideas.